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A New Year in the Undergrowth!

I hope you all had a splendid break and the return to work has not been too bad. Our year has started with a mix of code optimisation, improvements to combat systems and planning the year ahead.

EGX Rezzed

With that in mind Empires of the Undergrowth will be at EGX Rezzed in London on March 30th to April 1st.

We will be showcasing surface gameplay features as well as a range of new creatures. Additionally we will be testing out multiple ant species at this event too, so if you happen to be in the area, come and see us! More about this later in the year.

Optimisations

So what do we mean about optimisation? Well put simply we want you to be able to build more ants! There will of course be a limit on the amount you may build, but we want that limit to be as high as possible, so you really feel like you have a thriving colony.

This has meant Matt has had a proper poke around in Unreal Engine’s movement systems and is implementing our own movement routines, these are specific to our ants’ needs and should help us pump out those extra frames per second.

Abilities

One of our goals has always to be to show the variety of things that different ant species can do. Ant games in the past tended to have a generic ant, maybe branching into sub-types of worker, soldier, super soldier etc, but we wanted to do something different and try to show off some of the true range in nature.

John has been putting together a creature ability system that allows us to produce a lot of different types of ant and other creatures efficiently. We do not want to write completely new code each time we want a creature to jump for example and so there has to be a way to make variety quickly, and balance it so it still works in the game.

Music

Music is an important piece of any computer game, especially in Empires of the Undergrowth where the tempo helps to set the pace of play. Liam is currently working on a dynamic audio system that should adapt the musical atmosphere to match the action on the screen. We are in unfamiliar territory with this one, and we really don’t know what the end result will be, but the basic tunes are already coming together nicely.

2017 is going to be an exciting time for Empires of the Undergrowth, Make sure you have followed us on Twitter and Liked us on Facebook to see the game coming together.